Recording more than mere words

Throughout modern times, efforts to forge a nation and build a strong state, along with the irresistible advance of market forces, have sounded the death knell of languages by the score. At present there are some 6,000 linguistic communities in the world. More than half of them have fewer than 5,000 speakers. Over 1,000 have a mere dozen.

According to one scholarly estimate, just about 300 languages will survive by the end of the century. The extinction of the others spells the eclipse of cultural traditions that have endured since aeons: traditions that reveal — through speech, script and song — the mind of a people, their spirit, the template of their feelings and emotions. Unless a threatened language is recorded and documented in good time, its traces would be lost forever.

It is in this context that the launch of a new survey of Indian languages at Birla House in New Delhi on September 5 — Teacher’s Day and the birthday of S Radhakrishnan — assumes a momentous significance. The scale of this enterprise — conducted under the overall supervision of Ganesh Devy, head of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, an NGO based in Baroda — hasn’t been matched anywhere in the world.

Dozens of linguists and anthropologists associated with some 85 institutions took part in the exercise. More than 3,000 volunteers drawn from the linguistic communities themselves were trained to ferret out information about the origin and evolution of a language, its sayings and folk-tales, its ballads and songs and its other forms of expression. Hence the title ‘People’s Linguistic Survey of India’.

The enormity of this accomplishment — 50 volumes running into more than 35,000 pages and covering a total of 780 languages — must be measured against the backdrop of similar surveys conducted in the past. To find a precedent one needs to go as far back as 1898 when an Irish linguist, George Abraham Grierson, began to compile a list of languages spoken in British India. The list contained names of 179 languages and a couple of hundred for dialects.

Information on the subject is also available in gazetteers and population censuses conducted from time to time since the early 1930s. Equally interesting is the data contained in the 43 volumes of the Peoples of India Project. Kumar Suresh Singh, a distinguished scholar-administrator, initiated it after his appointment as the director-general of the Anthropological Survey of India in 1984. He completed it after retiring from service.

However, each one of these endeavours was flawed in one respect or the other. Many relied on local teachers and officials to obtain the required information. Some used administrative categories — such as SCs and STs — that had little relevance on the ground. There were cases where languages spoken by the so-called ‘criminal’ tribes or those spoken by less than 10,000 people, found no mention. Moreover, an overt emphasis on ‘unity’ — the hallmark of state-sponsored nationalism — overshadowed what was truly impressive about the country’s language landscape: its bewitching diversity.

The latest survey avoids these pitfalls and is thus able to present the diversity in a most comprehensive and detailed manner. It reveals, for instance, that the state where the largest number of languages are spoken is Arunachal Pradesh (90), followed by Assam, Odisha, Gujarat and Maharashtra (more than 50 each). Mahji, spoken in Sikkim, has only four speakers. And Bo, that was once prevalent in the Andaman islands, has none. The last speaker, an 80-year-old woman, also called Bo, died in January 2010. During the months preceding her death she spoke in Bo to birds and trees since no one else understood it.

The outcome of the indefatigable labours of Devy and his team is a celebration of what is unique to humankind — the gift of language that enriches other languages and is, in turn, enriched by them through interaction over the ages. It is also a lament for languages that are headed for oblivion.

The one loud message that this monumental work sends out is that there is no end to the discovery of India — an India where pluralism is an existential credo. And for driving home that point, its authors, led by Devy, deserve fulsome accolades.